The Daily Beast Podcast - Katy Tur’s Relationship With Keith Olbermann ‘Haunted’ Her

Episode Date: June 19, 2022

Haters love to attribute Katy Tur’s success to her former partner, commentator Keith Olbermann. But she’s over it. In this bonus episode of The New Abnormal podcast, Tur tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast how that early connection to the broadcaster has impacted her life since and recounts some anecdotes about her “violent” childhood from her new memoir, Rough Draft. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objective. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Katie Turr, who's of course a correspondent for NBC News and the anchor of MSNBC reports. But today, Molly's going to talk to her all about her new book, Rough Draft, a memoir.

But first, let's have some fun. All right, you guys ready to listen to some clips? Are we ever? We are. I mean, we are. We are. Okay, good. We very much are, Molly. Yes, we love it. Show favorite, Judge Box of Wine.

Haven't had her in a while. She's got some theories on all this Ukraine money in Hunter Biden. Oh, Jesus Christ. The United States, this is a sad commentary. He's got a gun. He's a sex addict. He's a drug addict. He was dishonorably discharged from the military.

This is a guy, by the way, why did we recently send $44 million or was a billion dollars to Ukraine? Why, the couple of weeks ago, the cash, why are we sending that to Ukraine? Why were we so late in sending ammunition to Ukraine? If Hunter Biden is the guy who tells his father what to do and when to do it, you have to wonder, is he behind the policymaking with China, Ukraine, and Russia, where he makes it? made millions. It is a sad state. Here's what I've decided, guys. Tell me if you think this is good. I think we need to, and I think Hunter Biden needs to agree to this, we need to give him to the conservatives. He needs to be Jesus and he needs to be given to the conservatives for our sins or whatever.

And they can do to him whatever they want and then they're not allowed to complain about him anymore and bring him up ever again and waste our fucking time with this guy. I have to tell you, I'm so impressed with how much they think we care about Hunter Biden. That's what I'm saying. I know. Like, anytime they're like, what about Hunter Biden, you're like, okay, lock them up. Like, I don't care. That's what I'm saying.

Right. That's exactly what I'm saying. Take them. Take them. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. It's like, don't threaten me with a good time. Like, I don't care.

I mean, you know, he's been on the podcast, and I respect that decision. But, you know, that's where it ends. They always think it's this huge gotcha for them. It's their new Benghazi. It's like, you know, what about Hunter Biden? Fine. Everything you think Hunter Biden did. Yeah, you can have him.

Go ahead. Yeah. Court martial. Lock him up. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Throw him in Gitmo.

I don't. And he needs to, he should agree to all of this for the good of the country. He needs to sacrifice himself. Or whatever. He doesn't have to agree. We don't. care. No, and if he doesn't, that's fine too, but I think he should. Yeah. And then we're done with Hunter Biden. You can't bring him up anymore. We gave you that one. And now you don't get to talk about him anymore. You don't get to what about him. Yeah. You know, every time one of your people does something god awful, which is every 42 seconds. Listen, I think that, you know, Hunter Biden, it's, by the way, it's like when I was on the radio with this horrible guy who was screaming at me on Canadian radio. And he was saying to me like, this, the January 6th committee doesn't do anything about inflation.

That's what it's like. It's like, oh, yeah. Well, Herschel Walker has 15 children. But what about Hunter Biden? As a content producer, what I can just never believe is that it's been years of her being on the air having these just rants like that. And they're like, yeah, no, no, just keep going. Keep doing that thing. It never gets better.

You guys, I just want to say one thing. The five is a highly rated Fox show and sometimes beats one Tucker Carlson in the ratings. Yeah. Yeah. And she's not the worst person on it. Oh, no. She's absolutely not. She's like the third worst person on it.

Well, as someone who's known also for being pretty bad with their alcohol consumption, there is somebody whose reputation's beating her these days, which is one Rudolph Giuliani. And he has theories on who's really behind January 6th. of the obvious point, that this was something that was put together by the left movement. It doesn't necessarily only mean Antifa. It means others that were trying to do anything they can to destroy any attempt that Trump had to to rectify the massive voter theft. It was clearly a frame-up. Like Russian collusion, like the innocent Ukrainian conversation, on and on and on, that means that.

These people are expert at trying to frame Donald Trump. I just want to say as a New Yorker, we need to stop having mayors. Yeah, I think that's fair. We need a full stop on my city, electing mayors until we figure out what the hell is going on. Yes, exactly. No more elections until we figure out what the hell is going on with our mayor problem. I mean, Rudy is the worst one. Andy L. Levy is calling for a total and complete shutdown of New York.

mayors entering greasy mansion. No more mayors until we figure out what the hell is going on. It's the only thing. I think I've said this before. I may be on Twitter, but we need every six months a different bodega cat should be mayor. And that's just how we should conduct our business because they're too good for us, those bodega cats.

Well, that is true. We could not ever meet their high standards. But my God. When you think about people we've had, mayor, it almost negates any good qualities that the entire city has that we've elected just the clowns I don't know how far back I would have to go in, in, I mean, granted, I'm only like 32, but yeah, so I'm not even sure if in my lifetime we've had a decent mayor. Napoleon, around the time of the Napoleonic Wars, there were good mayors in New York City.

Molly, do you miss, do you miss Mayor LaGuardia doing his radio reads? By the way, I just would like to point out of much younger than Andy Levy. And he says this because it's witchcraft and trickering. Okay, well, throw off the scent here. I'm going to also play somebody else throwing off the scent. Rep LaMalfa, speaking of last episode when we were talking about the backbenchers, he has some thoughts on what's more important than the January 6th committee. So what are we doing?

What are we doing? chasing January 6. Look at our border right now. We're under the current Biden policies. We're attracting the largest caravan ever of illegal aliens heading towards our border. The idea we're going to get rid of Title 42 or just the general perosity of the border anyway. They love that border. Here's the thing about the border.

Biden, and again, this is not an endorsement of Biden, nor is an endorsement of Trump, but Biden has Trump's border policies. They can't Title 42 is not happening. Nothing is happening. It's the same as it was under Trump except there are no, they're not gassing people, you know,

but that's it. Yeah, I just like if you ever woke up from a coma and you put on the news and you saw someone mention a caravan, you would, at the very least you would know it was an election. Yeah, exactly. Every two years, there's a caravan issue. And it's just

It's like clockwork. It's very true. It's happening. You know it because you see that the January 6th committee hearings are happening because they're talking about the caravan. Yeah. It's just, it's a great distractor. By the way, I was curious where he was from and he's from California's first congressional

district, which you would think, oh, well, okay, well, California shares a border with AHA California, which is Mexico, et cetera. So you would think, okay, well, that makes sense. Yeah, he's barely south of Oregon. Yeah, of course. I mean, the fact that California has any Republican congresspeople is a failing on our part as Democrats. At least on Jerryman. Yes.

So speaking of there being two totally different realities, we often on this podcast, complain about one Merrick fucking Garland not doing his job. Well, I and Ted has some other thoughts on what Merrick Garland is doing. And Merrick Garland has become perhaps the most political. Attorney General in the history of this country. He's willing to weaponize the Department of Justice and FBI to target parents as domestic terrorists, but he refuses to enforce the law against the people flagrantly violating the law, and Jen Saki at the White House encourages people go and protest at the Justice's House. I don't think she's doing that. I don't even, he's just, I think he might be the most morally bankrupt person in the country.

Like, he's he the most morally bankrupt living American. Is this Lion Ted? That was Lion Ted. Yeah, yeah. Because he knows, because he's not stupid. He's not stupid. I mean, it'd be close. It's like, and he doesn't believe this shit.

Like, Tucker Carlson, I'm now convinced, believes the absolutely ridiculous shit. I think he does. I think he believes a lot of it anyway. Or at least believes the principles behind it, principles in air quotes there. He might be a racist. Yes, exactly. Ted doesn't believe any of this shit. Ted is just trying to get famous. Like, at this point, he does the podcast, he has this podcast, he goes on all the, like, Ben Shapiro-style podcasts.

He has one of Michael Knowles now. Oh, he does, even better. Yeah, that's what half these clips of him come from. He sits there with that fucking moron and they talk. The guy just wants to be famous. And, you know, God bless. God bless. But, yeah, he sucks. I would just like to say, God do not bless. Yeah, he's disparaging our profession.

Geez, Molly. Yeah, that's right. Podcasting is serious business. I hate when people say you have the same job as Ted Cruz. Katie Turr is a correspondent for NBC News, as well as an anchor for MSNBC reports and the author of Rough Draft, A Memoir. Welcome to the new abnormal, Katie Turr.

Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly. Thanks for having me. We're always happy to have fancy anchorwomen here. So fancy. So fancy. And also we have this connection, which is that we are both edited by the same wonderful editor, Julia Chaffetz, at One Signal Press, which I want to say, A, because we both love her and B, because it's a little bit of a conflict. So I always want to just, like, say that right away. But truth be told, we became friends.

That's right. Before the Julia connection was made. That's right. Exactly. But, you know, it's always, I always feel like it's good to know. It's good to know. It's good to know. When you're interviewing a friend. And then it seems even more impressive when I ask you about things in the book. This is like a real book. First of all, we interview people a lot where it's clear they haven't written the book or perhaps even read the book. And so it is always nice, you know, this is like a real book with real writing and real stories in it. And I am particularly impressed by, I mean, this is probably pretty hard to write, discuss. It was really hard to write.

Let me ask you this because, well, I'll tell you this. I read, you had an article about your childhood and your mom and your dad. Yeah. I forgot which publication it was in. I want to say it was the times. I'm not sure. And I remember reading it a few years back and thinking, like, this is really good writing. This is a really interesting story. And it brought up the intention that I've always had,

or this, you know, foregone conclusion that eventually I would have to write down my own story of child, like my own, my parents. And I think that was, you know, a little bit of an incentive to push me forward with this idea when I found myself with a book contract. And without the book that I was in original, intended to write. Oh, I had that too. We have these very similar childhoods. I feel like you're a little younger than I am, maybe. Maybe a hair.

Maybe a hair younger. I'm 38. Oh, that's annoying. All right. Well, we'll still accept you, even though you are five years younger than I am. But you have this childhood that is a media childhood, but in a very interesting and strange way.

Will you tell our listeners about that? So I grew up in a helicopter, quite literally. I grew up in a helicopter. I spent more time in a helicopter than I did in my own bed. And that is because my parents were helicopter news journalists. They pioneered the genre. If you watch television in the 80s or 90s, you saw my parents work. If you saw a police pursuit, that was my parents.

If you saw the original Denny beating, the guy that got pulled out of the red gravel truck, gravel truck during the L.A. riots, that was my parents' video. If you saw O.J. being followed by the cops on that slow speed pursuit, that was my parents. Any video that came out of Los Angeles in the 80s and 90s was most likely shot by my parents. They even had video of Madonna giving my dad the finger on her wedding day in her wedding dress. With Sean Penn. Yeah, with Sean Penn. Yeah.

Were you in the helicopter for that or now? I was not in the helicopter for that, unfortunately. I think I would have been thrilled, but maybe a little saddened to see Madonna, the material girl, not being nice to us. That is an amazing story. It is incredible. And that's just the beginning. I mean, like, he almost got into a fist fight with Sean Penn and Axel Rose. My dad did at the time.

My dad got into multiple fights with police officers. One point punched my dad in the chest or the face. It's on camera. It was a wild and tumultuous childhood. Wild and fun because we lived in a helicopter and tumultuous because my dad, all of that fueled his success. Also fueled his, a scary side of his personality, a dangerous and sometimes violent side of his personality. And Molly, can I just make a note on pronouns? My dad transitioned in 2013.

My dad is now, Bob Tur is now Zoe Turr. My dad is a woman. And I call her my dad because she is my dad. I've had this conversation with her about it. But what I'm talking about my memories before the transition, those memories are of my father as Bob Turr. And so that's when I use the he pronoun. After that, I use the she.

I try to be as consistent as possible. Just in full honesty, full disclosure, it's kind of hard to rewire your brain when you have so much history with the person. So no disrespect. I am trying my hardest and I want to get that out there. Well, it's super interesting too because it is, there are a group of men who have transitioned to being women in that later in life, which is, I mean, because also he's this, isn't he sort of the same vintage as Caitlin Jenner? Yeah. And my dad would say that it's actually not surprising to have somebody who may be.

seemed very testosterone-driven, very male-seeming. He says that it's not surprising to have them transitioned sometime later in life. That mask is hiding a lot more, she says, at least. And your parents are divorced? My parents are divorced. They told me they were getting divorced on the day of my college graduation. Congratulations. Congratulations. We are no longer together. Well, that was good. They stayed together for you to go to college. That was nice of that. They did.

The day I graduated, my mom showed up alone. And my dad was sitting somewhere else. And I said, what the heck? Why aren't you guys sitting together? I mean, they had a rocky relationship, too. Don't get me wrong. And my mom said, I'm done. I'm leaving him.

I got you through college. You're on your own. Like, I've done my job. It's over. And it wasn't until much later. When I asked her, I said, you know, why that moment? Like, why did you choose my college graduation? Maybe could you have waited to the next.

next day. And she said, I couldn't because the night before she had come home and my dad was working on an edit for a documentary that he was working on. And she asked my dad how it was going and he turned around and punched her in the chest. Like, no, it's not going well. I just turned around and punched her in the chest. And she said, I'm done with this violence. This is it. I'm not doing it anymore. Oh, man. It's hard to argue with that. No, I know. But I mean, at the time, you know, I'm 20, 20, maybe 21. And for me, it felt like, because I'd grown up in this very violence, tumultuous, erratic, inconsistent childhood with this inconsistent childhood, with this marriage that, you know, was volatile. And so for me, it seemed normal. Like, all of this seemed normal. And so when my mom decided to leave him on that day, it was kind of hard to understand why that was the breaking point because there had been so many other instances in the past. And I was, I was a dumb 21 year old kid who didn't really understand what she was going through. Yeah. I mean, I knew it was bad and I had tried to intervene and I got, you know, I got very angry at my dad at points and I confronted him when I was a teenager and I told him to fuck off and to stop it and to get out of our lives. Punch me at one point. And I remember

thinking like, wow, you've really crossed a line here. But even with all of that because it was so normal in my head because it felt like so much a part of just a relationship that even then I still thought, wow, I wish you could have kept it together for longer to my mom, which is crazy, which is crazy looking back on it. You know, it's funny because it's like I also had one of those like insane childhoods. Like we had this stalker who used to live at the bottom of our driveway. I remember thinking like, this is normal. This is what people do. Like, this is how people live.

Like, you know, getting all this mail that would be scary. Like, and it's funny, wait till your kids get older because my kids will, like, complain about their childhoods. And I'm like, no, no. I'm like, have you met grandma? It's like, I'm now imagine she's your mother. I think that that's a really interesting question, though. And this is something that Tony and I, my husband and I kind of struggle with because Tony also had a crazy childhood to, you know, put it diplomatically.

His dad was a big-time drug smuggler, only marijuana. Oh, good for him. Good for him. It's important to make that distinction because I had thought, I mean, I feel like. No, but at the time they thought it's marijuana, it's not a bad thing. It's, you know, we're helping the world. We're not hurting it. And he was also just addicted to Coke.

Right. Disappeared when Tony was 10. Tony's mom moved them to Maryland. And he went from a lot to very little in terms of finances. And his whole childhood was upended. His dad was also violent. And so when we have conversations, we look at ourselves now and we think, you know, why are we the way that we are?

Why are we two people who have found each other and eschewed the erratic natures, issued violence, tried to be consistent with each other, are relatively calm, successful broadcasters. Like how did we get to this? How did we overcome all that? And do we need to fuck up our own children a little bit more to make them successful adults? But is their childhood going to be, is it going to be too normal? No, that's crazy. I say this as someone who had a very fucked up childhood and then had kids who have a very normal childhood and are quite loistered from all of that. No. No. It's better for them to have the same childhood. We're We are in the very, very small minority of people who don't, like, die of drug overdoses, who had our childhoods.

And, like, for whatever reason, I mean, for me, I know I got out because I got sober when I was 19. For you, you know, who knows what it was that was the thing that got you out of that, you know, not being in that cycle the way that your parents, you know what I mean? I think it was running away from the family in Los Angeles and just packing a bag and not going back. Wait, can we talk? Can we talk about Keith Oberman? Sure. One of the things I love about your story is like you keep having successes and people keep being like, well, you're only here because of this.

I feel like that's such an important metaphor for how women are treated today. I think a lot of women can relate to this. A lot of people who are, make excuses for their success. Yeah, I dated Keith when I left Los Angeles. and I was running away from a whole lot. My dad at the time was spiraling and was really depressed and was with stall in the book and I won't retell all of it, but he at the time was spiraling and I felt like he was,

if I didn't get out, I was going to drown alongside him. And so I picked up and I moved across the country and I didn't have anywhere to live. And I started dating Keith Olderman and he said, why don't you stay with me? And I said, great. And I liked him a lot. I mean, I really liked him a lot. The guy was very smart.

He was doing a show called Countdown. It was the early days of Countdown, middays of Countdown, which I thought was incredibly smart and provocative. I mean, in terms of broadcasting, he was unparalleled. I mean, he could write a beautiful script. He could deliver a beautiful script.

He was funny. He could hold your attention. And he was smart. And I was really attracted to the funny in the smart. And so we, we had a good relationship for a few years, broke up on amical terms, stayed friends for a while. But that relationship followed me for a long time in my career. And to this day, when somebody tries to bring me down to say, oh, she's only in the job that she's in, they'll bring up Keith Olberman. When they try to diminish me, and I get it on Twitter every

single day. Jesus Christ. Someone person telling me that I, you know, screwed my way to the top. Now I don't really care. Right. Now I roll my eyes. but there was a time in my life where it really haunted me. And it made me feel small and worthless. And I found myself closed off to my colleagues. I didn't trust anyone. I assumed if you were being nice to me that you had an ulterior motive.

To get to Keith Oberman. No, I'm just kidding. It's so it's so preposterous because, like, you're so much more successful than he is now. But I guess, like, you know, it's so the playbook is why I brought it up because it is so the play, you know, the playbook. of Diminishing Women. I mean, Rick Grinnell, who was a Romney guy and then a Trump guy, I think he very publicly

said it on Twitter in the middle of the campaign. Like he tried to call to apologize to me when he was trying to get an ambassadorship. I don't know. It just feels like the kind of traditional diminishing woman playbook. Of course. It's exactly, I mean, you felt it. Every woman has felt some version of that. Yeah.

One of the things that I like to ask people, because I think it's important, is like, what did you learn when writing this book? So I learned a lot. I was really hesitant to write this book. I knew that it had to be written, but I told you about this. I had, I have falls of anxiety that are knots of it that are stuck inside of me, especially as this is about to come out, comes out in a few days. We're pre-recording this. And I'm nervous. I'm really. really nervous. I have nightmares because I don't want to hurt my dad's feelings. Right. And there's that. And I also, and I know this is going to be hard for my dad to read. I know it's going to be hard for her to read. It would be hard for anybody to read. I also don't want all of that bad stuff to completely overtake a lot of the good stuff because there were, and when you read it, you'll see this. There were really fun parts of the childhood, parts of the childhood that made me who I am today. And there are parts of my dad's personality and her drive that have helped

me so much with where I am today, why I am in the position I am, why I'm successful, why I'm good at this job, why I could write a book. I also don't like the idea of being labeled a victim. I think that that's, I don't want that to become an identity of mine. Right. But in terms of when I wrote the book, I learned, I learned how I started to learn how I really felt about my childhood, how I could have both anger and frustration and rage toward how I grew up and love and compassion and halcyon memories about it. How you can have both of those things at the same time. And as I was writing it, I think it became clearer to me that it's okay to be in the position

I'm in now, which is a position of estrangement from my dad. So interesting. I mean, we do, I was so sure I had forgiven my parents everything. And then my mother got, you know, memory stuff and I got just so mad at her again. So it is really a process, I think. And I think it changes forever. I mean, it's everything and it's nothing. Yeah. No, parents are the final frontier of just, you know, this kind of thing. But I do think I am, I do think that our. kids that normal childhood is enough trauma that they don't have to go through what we went through to be high functioning adults. And in fact, it's better if they don't, you know, but it is complicated and it's so interesting. And you're back from maternity leave for a few months and you're also, people can watch you on MSNBC at 2 o'clock. Yeah, they can. I have been back for a few months now. Two o'clock. All about, and then doing all sorts of special coverage now for the January 6 hearings.

And the last chapter of the book is about the insurrection. Oh, wow. Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Katie Turr. Molly, thank you as well. I love talking to you about this stuff

because you want to know what? We talk about this stuff when we're not doing a podcast. It's true. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics,

and science will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the daily beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover

what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.